Introduction

How would you handover a ransom from an express train to a kidnapper waiting alongside the tracks? After all, the passenger cars are all air-conditioned, and the windows don’t open…. This was the climactic dilemma of the 1963 suspense film High and Low by world-famous director Akira Kurosawa. The venue was the Kodama (Echo) limited express, the pre-shinkansen crowning achievement of Japanese railways making the run between Tokyo and Osaka in 6.5 hours. Kurosawa was inspired to make the film after reading Ed McBain’s novel King’s Ransom. However, the film’s adaptation of handing over the ransom was achieved thanks to the complex schedules and on-time operation that are the pride of Japanese railways.

In such a railway powerhouse, Japanese railway timetables have long been a treasured necessity for travel. At one time, millions were published monthly, making them hidden best-sellers. However, as an island nation, there are no cross-border services, so Japanese timetables have a definite Japanese flavour targeted at an almost exclusively Japanese audience. Few timetables have ever been mainly in English or other foreign languages, with notable exceptions being simplified versions distributed during the 1964 Tokyo Olympics and other expositions when many foreign visitors were in Japan.

Most of these rare timetables were taken abroad when the visitors left, so people in Japan rarely glimpsed such items. Because timetables are a practical item that become useless as soon as the timetable changes, most were thrown away, significantly reducing the chance of finding remaining versions today. However, you might be lucky enough to discover a rare copy at a local flea market or in a used-book store, and if you do, this article could help you decipher it.

The Early Days

The world’s first steam-hauled passenger railway started in England with the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway in 1830. Soon after, the first edition of Bradshaw’s Railway Time Tables was published, becoming synonymous with rail travel. At that time, Japan was still ruled by a shogun, his daimyo (lord), and samurai (warrior), and any contact with the outside world was very restricted. It was to be another 37 years before Japan opened up to the world with the restoration of the Meiji Emperor. Japan’s first railway started 5 years later in 1872 with a short 18-mile single track between Shimbashi in Tokyo and Yokohama. A year later in 1873, Thomas Cook published his first timetable, and Cook’s timetables are still used worldwide today (see pp. 18 to 23).

In the early days, Japanese railways were operated by foreigners working for the Japanese government. We can guess that these people worked in English, but whether or not English timetables were released to the public is unclear. However, Japan was now being visited by businessmen, traders and tourists from abroad, especially from North America and Europe, so we can easily imagine demand for foreign-language timetables as railway lines spread through the nation. The first monthly timetable in Japan was the Train & Steamer Travel Guide (Kisha Kisen Ryokou Annai), which was first published in 1894 for Japanese users, making it practically unintelligible to people who could not read Japanese. In addition to station names, even the numbers in the tables were in Japanese kanji characters instead of the Arabic numerals in general use today. The situation was the same for all timetables issued in Japan. For this reason, hotels with foreign guests would create and distribute booklets with schedules written in English. For example, the timetable issued in 1898 by The Grand Hotel had just six pages centred on schedules for lines between Tokyo and Kobe along with services to Hakone (Kodzu), Nikko, and Yokosuka. The Grand Hotel was a leading Western-style hotel in Yokohama but it burned down in the aftermath of the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake and was never rebuilt. The Hotel New Grand opened later bears its name today.

Incidentally, the Welcome Society was formed at this time by some businessmen and others to provide assistance to foreign visitors to Japan. As a part of their service, they produced and distributed English railway timetables. However, as the name suggests, it was a society characterized by the activities of interested progressive private citizens. There was no government movement to promote tourism to Japan at that time.

To catch up quickly with the already highly industrialized Western nations, latecomer Japan put great effort into advancing its national power. It established government run factories in various locations, working to develop an export industry. At the same time, Japan attempted to secure interests in mainland Asia and gain a greater say in international society through the 1894 Sino-Japanese War and 1904 Russo-Japanese War. In such an age where railways were considered essential for industrial advancement and to a powerful war machine, new tracks were built in quick succession. Moreover, most private lines were nationalized in 1906; private lines considered important in forming a nationwide network were bought out and operated by the government.

As a result, Japan’s 1500 km of government operated railways in 1900 grew quickly to 7800 km by 1910.

Once the foundations were laid for government administration of nationwide railways, it was natural for official passenger timetables covering the nationwide network to be published by the railway authorities. The government railways’ timetable issued in June 1910 differed greatly from the private timetables written in kanji characters, because it used Arabic numerals and included English notes to allow use by foreigners. From hereon, the government railways continued issuing new official timetables at every train diagram change. Around this time, momentum gathered at government level to actively promote foreign tourism to create international goodwill and stimulate the economy by securing foreign capital. In 1912, railway authorities, shipping companies, prominent hotels, and others sponsored the establishment of the Japan Tourist Bureau, the forerunner of today’s JTB, Japan’s largest travel agency. Due to these developments, the government railways started issuing English and Japanese timetables, marking the appearance of full-fledged English timetables in Japan.

Let’s look at the details of an English language timetable for August 1918. The covers advertise places of scenic beauty in Japan, and this issue has a photograph of the peaks of the Northern Alps of Japan. The mountain areas of Karuizawa and the northern Chubu region were talked about and developed from the late 19th century by missionaries and other foreign visitors to Japan as a place to escape the sultry summer heat of the coastal Kanto Plain and the cover evokes this background. The book is 7.5 by 9 inches, and its format is Western style where it can be folded in half. It has 82 pages, and is bound with a fold-out index map in the middle. An interesting feature is the western Table-Number format. By referring to the chart for the station name and Table-Number at the beginning, one could easily find the relevant table for departures and arrivals. Times are in the 12-hour style with a.m. in light type and p.m. in bold, demonstrating the Western standard for timetable formats of the period.

Of course, services in Japan were covered, but the timetable also includes the Korean peninsula and Taiwan— Japanese colonies at the time. Inclusion of continental China and the note ‘Connecting service between Japan and Russia’ demonstrate the immense scale covered. Connections to Russia were just one of the routes linking Asia and Europe, and after the Russo-Japanese War, this route was popularized as being much faster than ship. Due to international conflicts, such as World War I and the Russian Revolution, schedules within Russia were not noted, because routes were disrupted.

The inclusion of colonial railways in the timetable of a colonial power was quite unusual. Colonies of western nations were generally far from their ruling country, so there was no merit in including them and timetables for western colonies covered just those regions. In India, for example, Indian Bradshaw noted schedules for South Asia and surrounding British territories. In Malaya and the Dutch East Indies, local railway authorities and information bureaus issued timetables. In pre-World War II Japanese colonies, the local railway authorities—Government Railways of Chosen (Korea) and Taiwan Government Railways—issued their own timetables, but schedules for those railways were always also included in timetables for mainland Japan. The timetable for the South Manchuria Railway (SMR), which was established in 1906 to annexe the Russian-established Chinese-Eastern Railway and reigned in NE China for the next 40 years, is also in the Japanese timetable. However, railways in SE Asia that were under Japanese control during World War II were not noted in the timetables at all.

Hand-in-hand with Rapid Growth of Railways

At the same time, there was a revolutionary development in Japan’s timetables—the start of sales of the official government railways’ timetable, which had previously been only for internal use. It was in an 8 by 9-inch, 226-page format, and much larger than the B6 timetables issued by the private sector. In effect, it was the inaugural issue of the JTB Timetable, which is still issued today and reached the 1000th issue 84 years later in May 2009 with much media fanfare. With Japanese timetables becoming more substantial, English timetables also changed from thin pamphlets to thicker book formats.

Next, comes the English timetable issued in December 1931 by the Japan Tourist Bureau. At 7.5 by 5 inches, this Condensed Time Tables on Principal Lines was slightly smaller than previous timetables, but boasted a full 236 pages. The change to include many advertisements for gift shops and other businesses of interest to foreign visitors came about with the switch from an internal timetable to a timetable sold to the public.

It is filled with notes evoking images of the prewar golden age of railways. Images of trains gracing the covers include the Fuji and Sakura (Cherry Blossom) limited expresses running from Tokyo to Shimonoseki in September 1929, which were named by public contest, and the Tsubame (Swallow), making its debut in October 1930 to connect Tokyo and Kobe in a record time of 7 hours.

A major change in the 1931 timetables compared to 1918 was the disappearance of the Table-Number format. To find arrival and departure times for a station, first you search for the line for that station on the line map; then you look for the page number for that line noted in red next to the line; and finally you open the timetable to that page. If you know the line in advance, you look in the index for the page with that line. The chart for station names and Table-Number that once graced the beginning of timetables was transformed to a chart for station names and pages that station names are on, but it was pushed to the back of the timetable.

The method of referring to schedules based on the page showing lines was the same as that for Japanese timetables at the time. The timing and reason why government railways’ timetables eliminated the Table-Number format and changed to page-number reference chart are unclear. Perhaps reassigning the Table-Number was considered a cumbersome task when new lines were opening and private railways were being nationalized. One point was that finding schedules using the page-number reference method imposed little burden on users because the rail network was physically isolated from other countries and operated on a uniformly administered nationwide system. Each line had its own name, and geographical locations of places such as cities on lines were relatively easy to absorb by the general Japanese populace. For example, the Tokaido main line was well known as the line along the Pacific coast from Tokyo to Kobe, and the Ou main line was the line from Fukushima north to Yamagata and Akita. In addition, train operation was almost all line-based and very few trains ran on complex routes over multiple lines.

On the other hand, Continental European railways were characterized by complex networks crisscrossing the land; international trains carrying travellers from many countries ran across the entire continent. Consequently, the timetables could not be closed for a single country, and the concepts of direction and operation system were emphasized instead of a line in a single country. Stations themselves became the natural starting point for finding a schedule. The UK, an island nation like Japan, used the page-number reference method in Bradshaw’s Timetable, which was issued for many years in that country.

The 1931 timetables included international steamship routes and schedules that were not in the 1918 timetables, and note the schedule for the Tokyo–Dalian air route that started in 1929. The international steamship route schedules included the Japanese companies Nippon Yusen Kaisha and Osaka Shosen Kaisha as well as the round-the-world service of Robert Dollar Co. This ambitious feature of the English version was not included in Japanese versions.

The route via Siberia, connecting Asia and Europe, came into the spotlight again when WWI and the Russian Revolution settled down. International connections between Japan via Siberia to Europe restarted in August 1927. The ‘connecting service between Japan and Europe’ in this timetable noted the schedule and operation days. It was a long trip of about 14 days from Tokyo to Paris. The Asia–Europe route via Siberia was also noted in European timetables issued by Thomas Cook and Germany’s Mitropa (a company running sleeper and dining cars). These timetables still evoke an image of the romantic age of rail travel before international air routes.

The Condensed Time Tables were issued irregularly afterwards. The March 1933 edition is interspaced with pictures of places of Japanese scenic beauty, and includes bus schedules—especially services to various hot springs— which had finally become a viable mode of transport. The government railways set up the Board of Tourist Industry in April 1930 as an organization to promote overseas travel to Japan. In an age when the country was actively starting to attract foreign visitors, the content of timetables evolved to meet the needs of tourists interested in Japanese culture and traditions. According to statistics for 1936, the year before war broke out between Japan and China, 42,000 tourists visited Japan; 17,000 were Chinese and Manchurians.

Behind the emphasis on the uniqueness of Japan was a vigorous defence of the country, which was under intense international criticism for military moves in China since the early 1930s. Timetables give a glimpse at the propaganda campaign to present Japan with a clean image using tourism. Railways in prewar Japan were not classified as strategic facilities, but areas near important ports and straits were designated strategic zones where photography and sketching were prohibited. These areas are clearly noted in the index map as early as 1931, signalling the approaching dark times of war.

Allied Occupation

Rapid Economic Growth: Japan as Major Political and Economic Power

Epilogue